Kamikaze: History's Greatest Naval Disaster
by James Delgado
Vintage Books, 2010, 225 pages
Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, who founded the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps
in October 1944, selected the meaningful name of Kamikaze  for the unit
designated to carry out aerial suicide attacks against Allied warships. All
Japanese people knew the legend of the famous kamikaze, meaning "divine wind,"
which had destroyed Mongol invaders who attacked Japan in the late 13th century.
Ohnishi hoped that kamikaze pilots would accomplish the same end as the
historical kamikaze, namely, to destroy enemy ships and turn back the foreign invaders.
James Delgado, President of the Institute of National Archaeology and author
or editor of 30 books, has written a fascinating narrative concerning known
facts and uncertain legends related to the 13th century kamikaze. This paperback
entitled Kamikaze: History's Greatest Naval Disaster contains extensive
historical background for the two Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281.
The author often introduces historical events based on artifacts that have been
discovered. The hardcover book published in 2009 by Bodley Head has the same
contents but different title, Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet: History's Greatest
Naval Disaster. The book's origin comes from Delgado's archaeological dive in
August 2002 at Takashima Island, where a powerful storm destroyed much of
Khubilai Khan's navy in 1281. This trip became the basis for a 2003 one-hour TV
episode entitled "The Lost Ships of Kublai Khan," which was hosted by Delgado
for the series The Sea Hunters.
The first Mongol invasion of Japan in 1274 does not get introduced until
Chapter 7, about halfway through the book. The book's first half provides
historical background to understand the two Mongol invasions of Japan. Chapters
cover topics such as Asian mariners, Genghis Khan and the rise of the Mongols,
his grandson Khubilai who became the first and greatest Mongol emperor of China,
and the navy built by the Song Dynasty of southern China. Since this book was
written for a general rather than an academic audience, this wide-ranging
history helps readers unfamiliar with the topic to better understand the reasons
and background of the Mongol invasions of Japan.
The 1274 Mongol invasion gets covered rather briefly in Chapter 7. Khubilai
Khan first sent envoys to Japan in 1268 with a demand of subservience to the
Mongols, but this envoy and two subsequent ones sent to Japan were ignored by
the country's leaders, acts that could be interpreted by the Mongols as a
declaration of war. On October 3, 1274, an armada left the Korean peninsula and
sailed toward the Japanese island of Kyushu with 6,700 sailors and 23,000
Mongol, Chinese, and Korean soldiers. After the armada quickly overwhelmed
Japanese forces on Tsushima and Iki, two small islands in the Korea Strait,
about six thousand Japanese soldiers (number estimated by modern Japanese
historians) met the invading Mongol force at Hakata Bay when they arrived on
October 19. The two armies clashed and then the Japanese forces waited for the
next morning to continue fighting, but they found then that most Mongol ships
had vanished. Historians do not know why the Mongol force left so quickly. One
Japanese source wrote in 1274 that a reverse wind (typhoon?) caused the ships to
return, but the reason could be as simple as the Mongol force decided to retreat
when it realized that the Japanese defenders were too strong for the invading
army to overpower easily.
Chapter 8 tells the story of the 1281 Mongol invasion, although much remains
uncertain such as the total number of ships and soldiers. After the unsuccessful
1274 Mongol invasion, Japan prepared for another invasion by constructing a
Mongol Defense Wall in Hakata and by organizing a defense force. In both 1275
and 1279, the Japanese shogunate beheaded envoys from Khubilai Khan demanding
surrender by Japan, so the next Mongol invasion in 1281 came as no surprise.
Khubilai Khan planned to attack Japan with an overwhelming force of two fleets,
one with 40 thousand troops from the Korean peninsula and another with 100
thousand troops from southern China made up in large part of the former Song
Dynasty navy. The force from the Korean peninsula did not wait for the southern
China force and arrived at Hakata in the middle of June 1281. The 3,500 ships in
the Mongol force from southern China later reached Japan and landed about 30
miles south of Hakata. The Mongol forces and the Japanese army fought each other
to a stalemate for nearly two months. On August 15 and 16, 1281, a typhoon
destroyed nearly all of the Mongol fleet, which ended the attempted invasion.
The next chapter presents an excellent analysis of the myths that sprang up
around the kamikaze (divine wind) that destroyed the Mongol invaders. During
Japan's long period of isolation between 1636 and 1854, most Japanese people had
no knowledge of the Mongol invasions and the typhoon that destroyed the invaders in
1281, since the shogunate prohibited any mention of the events. This historical
event was not common knowledge among the Japanese people until 1890, when long
forgotten scrolls depicting the event reappeared. During the 1890s, the legend
was resurrected and grew as more emphasis was placed on divine intervention
against an overwhelming foreign invading force. Militarists from that time until
the end of WWII used the kamikaze legend to emphasize that Japan was under
divine protection. Vice Admiral Ohnishi also invoked this legend when he formed
the Shinpu (another way to read the Chinese characters for Kamikaze) Special
Attack Corps in the Philippines in October 1944 as the Japanese military sought
an effective way to mount a defense against overwhelming Allied forces.
Chapters 10 and 11 focus on marine archaeological work, mostly at Takashima
Island off the Kyushu coast, to uncover and analyze evidence of the 13th century
Mongol invasions. This section gives general readers a glimpse into the
difficult challenges faced by marine archaeologists as they try to piece
together facts and come to tentative conclusions related to historical events
that took place more than 700 years ago. However, the author does not provide
too many details about the day-to-day work of a marine archaeologist but rather
summarizes findings of artifacts and analysis of these in order to arrive at
tentative conclusions as to what actually happened during the Mongol invasions.
Randy Sasaki, a graduate of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, explains the
difficulty in making sense of the artifacts that have been found (p. 142):
It is analogous to reconstructing 4,000 different jigsaw puzzles with
only one percent of the pieces remaining and no templates. Those pieces were
put into a blender of sea and were mixed together. It is difficult to figure
out which piece goes to which ship.
Based on analysis of pieces of ships that have been recovered from the sea
floor, Sasaki has evidence that the Mongol fleet that attacked in 1281 was
constructed hastily with shoddy workmanship, which may have been a major reason
why the ships did not survive the typhoon that hit the area. The last chapter
(12) somewhat strays from the book's main topic as Delgado discusses subsequent
Mongol naval invasions that failed in the areas of Vietnam and Java.
The book's center contains 16 pages of black-and-white photographs, but the
text does not directly refer to these in order to integrate them into the
narrative. The author's thorough research is reflected in ten pages of sources
and 20 pages of notes at the end. The front has four pages of maps,
including ones showing the routes followed by the invading Mongol fleets in 1274
Kamikaze: History's Greatest Naval Disaster, with its accessible language and
style, not only tells what has been discovered about the 13th century Mongol
invasions of Japan but also presents some of the challenges of marine
archaeology. Much remains to be discovered as marine archaeologists continue to
work to find pieces of Mongol ships and the artifacts they contained.
1. Actually, Vice Admiral Ohnishi chose the name of Shinpu for the new air
unit that would use Zero fighters carrying 250-kg bombs to crash into enemy
ships in the Philippines. Shinpu is an alternative reading of the two kanji
(Chinese characters) normally read by Japanese people as kamikaze. Both readings
have the same meaning of "divine wind."